The Picture of Dorian Gray

My first aesthetic experience of sin happened during my adolescence, and took the shape of a book.

Opening the first few pages of that beautiful novel was an explosion of sensorial, metaphysical delight. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a piece so full of beauty that every word felt like it was spilling into me in pools of liquid rubies. I was fascinated by Wilde’s style, his charming wit in the form of those British dandies who became my lovers.

The book possessed me, in its blue fumes of love and gorgeous sin, I lived in it all that I hadn’t yet committed. Influence, terrible and beautifully dressed, swirled in the ink I wrote, and my writings became passionate, doomed and luxurious.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Yes! Everything in those pages was true and unforgiving, every word mulled into wine that burst on the tongue. It is a novel “as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal”. It hails Beauty as its only God, taking Dionysus for its jester. It soars above morality, seeing all and taking pleasure in everything but suffering. I adored it like a virgin before Mary.

At the time, it seemed to me this was the only book worthy to be read at all. So I read it over and over, as though drinking it in so I could become as rich as its scenes and beautiful as its flowers. My world spun with color and music, became an aesthetic revelation necessarily bound to the dark allure of some vague sin.

I then stumbled upon the whiteness of the Haiku. Those few lines made empty space so full of lifetimes of emotion that I became dizzy on their effect. That emptiness changed with every season and mood, it was so bold yet open to the world - then, the Haiku became a zest dashed upon the potion of Wilde’s aestheticism. I drank everything with hungry lips, still blessed with the pardon of youth.

As I grew, I began to fill in my body, and I let poetry rush into the world, transformed at my touch. I lived life vicariously, exploring all those cloudy “sins” with curiosity and a relish derived from their aesthetic purpose. It was experience and observation, study and action that determined those wild days a girl has as her age loses its beginning “1”. In my twenties, everything became two-dimensional - simple, yet intricately layered. I passed from the sketch to the painting, and maybe as I bloom with age, I too, will see fascinating changes that life will etch into my soul.